Park for the people

Thousands turn out for Millennium Park opening

July 19, 2004|By Chicago Tribune.

Shoulder to shoulder with strangers, Mark Vargas strolled under the big, silver sculpture and stopped, awestruck.

He laughed as he tried to find himself among the people reflected in the mirrored image above, swaying side to side and raising his arms high over his head. Snap went his friend's camera. Snap, snap went dozens of others around him.

"This is incredible," said Vargas after he walked through "Cloud Gate," the beanlike sculpture at Millennium Park. "It's like an optical illusion, like a drop of mercury."

Under cotton candy-blue skies, more than 100,000 people streamed into the park Sunday, an estimated 300,000 over the entire weekend, to do just as Vargas did.

They came in swimsuits and heels, carrying backpacks and pushing strollers, juggling coolers and cameras. In short, they came to party.

And it was a party of the noblest order, a confluence of good vibes, where strangers smiled at one another without prompting and parents let their children run through the new Crown Fountain without telling them to slow down.

"Here it comes! Here it goes!" shouted Ben Fine as he watched the faces on the Crown Fountain purse their lips and spit out streams of water.

His two children, Adam and Alice, squealed as a cascading spout soaked them head to toe.

"If the point of a public park is to bring people out and together, all different cultures and people, then this park is a great success," said Fine, who came with his wife and children from Hyde Park. He had to persuade his children to come to the park, but that reluctance disappeared when they arrived, he said.

"As soon as we got out of the car, they were like, 'Oh wow! This is great!'" he said.

Strangers exchanged ideas about what the Jay Pritzker Pavilion resembled, and wandered aimlessly through the Lurie Garden. Many wound their way across the snaking BP Bridge, just to turn around and do it all over again once they got to the other end.

"I just liked the sounds, to have all these people clip-clopping across the wooden bridge," said Paula Pohlhammer, who came to the park Sunday from Oak Park.

Her husband, Peter, a skeptic of the park's modern architecture and especially the folds of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, said his opinion changed after visiting the park.

"My first thought was, 'What a monstrosity,'" he said. "From the outside, I think it's kind of ugly. But then when you're inside, looking out, you see that you're really getting a view like no other."